European Canon of Values as the Foundation of the Digital Future

Over the past decades, the emancipatory potential of the political public sphere – in the sense of private individuals coming together to form it – has been lost. Consequently, the relatively stable and centuries-long construct of journalism has been challenged by new forms of censorship.

The economic and social upheavals we can observe today with the once so hopefully interpreted democratization of the public sphere through digitalization – to put it somewhat exaggeratedly in Habermas' terms – probably bestows a public discussion process with feudalistic conditions on us once again

By combining neoliberal economic practices with oligarchic ownership of global communication platforms, opinion-forming giants have firmly established themselves in the digital space in the span of just a few decades. They largely dictate the global public experience and manipulate what the public hears and sees based on their own rules (algorithms).

Long-established cultural norms have gradually eroded with the omnipresence of our digital parallel world. New production and working conditions have been euphorically accepted in the same way as the almost free use of smart electronic services for all situations in life.

Since 2000, the Internet has risen to become the primary source of information for news consumption and reception within less than a quarter of a century.

Against the backdrop of this assessment, however, hope has been growing for some time. Particularly in academia, but also in many civil society activity circles, the explosive threats of the networked world as described above have been increasingly recognized.

In an endeavor to increase public awareness of the need to shape digital humanism, people have begun to focus on reconstructing Europe as a unique digital community of values.

Europe has always had its own ideals from the very beginning. Its name, Europa, derives from Greek mythology: Zeus, in the form of a white bull, wooed the daughter ‘Europa’ of the Phoenician king Agenor and abducted her to Crete.

Over more than 2,000 years of history, the continent has developed its own unique values, with human dignity at the core. Today's European values are based on different lifeworlds and the attitudes shaped by them, starting with the birth of Christianity, which emerged from Judaism and emphasizes the belief in mercy and love of one's neighbor.

Later, these values were shaped by the philosophers of ancient Greece, to whom we owe the form of government and democracy that still prevails today. This was followed by Roman law as the precursor to today's ‘rule of law’ and the deepening and renewal of this cultural heritage during the Renaissance.

During the Enlightenment, individuals were empowered to shape their lives freely, and in the 20^th century, after the catastrophes of the world wars, the continent finally united – in its enviable diversity of peoples and languages – in the greatest peace project in human history.

In this context, it is interesting to note that European values developed in their uniqueness based on a 2,500-year-old philosophy of life, which always focussed on reason as the determining element for all discourse.

The values were able to develop precisely because the initial judgements and world views, which at the time also included claims to power, were questioned in later historical epochs and broken up in a directional way.

For example, it was secularization, the separation of church and state, that gave religions back their original purpose as a humane force.

Despite Europe's cultural diversity, it is also astonishing to note what the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset identified at the beginning of the last century: Four-fifths of our intellectual property is European common property, which means that our essential values and interests are identical.

In recent years, several scientific initiatives have attracted social attention and have been reflected in public awareness: The ‘AlgoSoc’ (Public Values in the Algorithmic Society) priority research program, funded in the Netherlands and in which the University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Utrecht University and Tilburg University are involved with both natural sciences and humanities faculties and institutes, is investigating the implementation of solutions in the socially highly relevant areas of justice, health and media.

These solutions enable the translation of desired public values into institutional design and legal frameworks for automated decision making and trigger desirable individual-social effects.

The ‘Social Europe’-project ‘Towards a European Digital Public Sphere’, the ‘Eurostack’-initiative as a new industrial strategy or ‘Gaia-X’ with the important innovative concepts of sovereign data spaces are all pursuing new approaches to achieve a necessary digital sovereignty for Europe.

At its core, this sovereignty is not subject to the dominance and distortions of the US digital industrial giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft or technological dependence on emerging Asian platform operators.

The brilliant Dutch political scientist Marietje Schaake, non-resident fellow at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center and the Institute for Human Centered AI, former advisor to the UN's High Level Advisory Board on AI and Member of the European Parliament on Tech Policy between 2009 and 2019, has summed up in her book ‘The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley’, published this year by Princeton University Press, how the loss of all democratic governance on the internet came about and how we can now regain sovereignty by returning to the only self-correcting system, which is democracy. We should all make this our motto:

‘Democracy works best when people are given the opportunity to constantly monitor and repair the kinks in the machinery’!